Icarus Ascending
by CarmineDuvale
Summary: A time-turner accident sent Gabrielle Delacour way back. Long before the War had started, long before a love potion had been brewed, long before a Dark Lord had been born. "Tom Riddle came across her and stopped. He had never seen something so pitiable before." Short multiple chapters.
1. This Time It's War

**1.**

It was bad.

Or rather, the beginning had been good enough to be bad. The middle had been just an atrocity after another. And the end? The end was terrible.

 _(The end was just mindless slaughter, blood spilled on every dais available, gore knocking on random doors, pain coloring the sky in an abstract reinterpretation of whatever. The end was just insanity dripping, nonsense wrapped in battle, war fought for the love of fighting.)_

The end was nothingness; thoughtless and hopeless inexistence.

Nobody used to know more about hope than Gabrielle Delacour.

 _(She used to be the toddler with the daisy crowns and the teenager with yellow painted walls and the friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chocolate chip cookies and stupid knock-knock jocks and boys-are-dumb-so-go-for-girls speeches. She was none of those things anymore._

 _She had reasons not to and her reasons were mostly marble headstones and loneliness of blood._

 _They were good enough as far as reasons went.)_

Of course, you couldn't in all fairness say she's lost more than anyone else, but it would've been a lie to say she hadn't lost enough. She's lost herself, so what do you want more?

 _(Knock knock._ _ **Who's there?**_ _Not your sister, she's not playing with a full deck anymore.)_

By the end, Gabrielle didn't have hope not to die anymore but wanted to stay alive out of a twisted sense of spiteful rightfulness that tingled in her veins.

 _(She wanted to lock herself in a room and decay there, with an always opened window so she could breath the changes in the air, and drapes that reached the floor so she couldn't see the sun, and she wanted quiet interrupted by the buzz of other people's lives, and she wanted to be no part of those existences, but the kind of illusory being who's so dead on her feet her name gets stuck in your throat when you think it._

 _She just didn't want to be truly, undeniably dead._

 _She_ _ **didn't.**_ _)_

By the time they had all those losses and all those deaths and all those heavily failed plans, she was just tired and the only thing she had left was her mind. Even that was questionable.

 _(And a dead mother and a dead father and an insane sister and so many dead Weasleys she needed more fingers to count them than she had._

 _She cut some off Death Eaters and counted afterwards.)_

But she still had it, her ration, so she knew right away sending Ginevra Weasley back was a very bad idea.

 _(Almost as bad as the end, honestly.)_

"She's too raw," she told Hermione one night. "She'll mess it up."

 _(Hermione, too, was tired by now. Tired and legless and heart-broken._

 _Harry was dead._

 _Ron was dead._

 _Draco Malfoy… Draco Malfoy was a special story altogether and Gabrielle knew better than to bring him up again.)_

"Dumbledore wants her because of their bond." She pursed her lips in thought. "But I think you might be right. Ginny doesn't know how to manage her anger anymore. She'll want to do it all up-front and he'll kill her before she finishes her little tirade."

 _(War had hardened Hermione Malfoy. It had also opened her eyes.)_

"Do you really believe this is the best shot we've got?" Gabrielle asked. "We're talking negating our entire reality here for the slight chance another future might be better."

"To be fair, we're actually talking about leaving our fates in the hands of an unstable woman with deep emotional traumas because a puppeteer whose best ideas were to fake his death and sent kids on wild goose chases thinks it's best. There's no decent shot in that; it's doomed to fail." She shrugged. "But really, what's there to live for anymore?"

 _(War had embittered Hermione Malfoy. It had also made her sharper._

 _And Gabrielle agreed.)_

It didn't go well, of course, but it also went worse than they expected.

They all died, fell like heroes fighting the good fight, like all the dead whose deaths are glossed over in things that start as fairytales. Gabrielle didn't. She jumped over the body of what had been the brightest witch of the age to get to the experimentally enchanted Time Turner.

She didn't and saw Dumbledore trying to Apparate away before being hit by a stray curse.

She didn't and stepped on Ginny Weasley's mangled corpse and all that dirty red hair coiled around her legs.

A deviated hex hit the jewelry and propelled her into the past engulfed in a thick cloud of colorful dust. By the time her body fell on the grassy hill, her time ceased to exist.

Just like magic.

* * *

 ** _Hello? This is such a rare (inexistent?) pairing that I doubt anyone would read it but hello :)_**


	2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

**2.**

The first thing she saw was the sun.

It was lovely – yellowish, and reddish, and swirling with life – and Gabrielle, still with the taste of death of her tongue, hated it.

The second was the silhouette – a brownish, grayish, formless glob scurrying about in a tangle of weeds that might have been a yard, beside an upright ruin that might have been a house, somewhere way down, in the valley bellow.

 _People,_ Gabrielle thought, and she ducked lest she be observed and closed her eyes, blocking the tremendously alive light. With the unadorned chain of the Time Turner still clasped in a fist, she curled in the soft grass and, after weeks of wishing to exist on, pretended she was dead.

She had to get up, of course.

There was hunger to be considered, and pain from the little cuts littering her body, and the anxiety of being out in the open was eating away at her conscience. It had taken less than a minute, her body unable to shut down, her mind incapable of drifting off in the obliviousness she craved, for her to get up and encompass her surrounding with a hardened, suspicious gaze.

She felt watched, as if every empty space cradled a Disillusioned Death Eater, as if every bug or bird or rodent was an Animagus, as if War had followed, through the veil of time, through the intricacies of space, as if it had come along to wrap around her neck and snatch the piece of earth under her feet and leave her dangling over nothingness. She was exposed and it made her feel dissected.

The person in the valley had disappeared, but Gabrielle viscerally _needed_ to get out of the open space, somewhere where the bright light couldn't reach, somewhere where the silence didn't buzz so loud, and _think._ She needed to _think_.

She stumbled uphill, where a few trees with drooping foliage seemed to congregate and, once under their cover, dropped down and hugged herself close, wand clutched in hand. "Salvio Hexia," she muttered. "Protego Maxima." A Repellum Inimicum later, she allowed her body to relax a modicum and let her head rest against the scratchy bark of the tree.

For the first time, she wondered where she had ended up. It was obviously summer, when, just a few minutes before, in a future that had probably already degraded to nothingness, it had been a dreary, insurmountable autumn, more or less on the cups of agonizing winter. Their Headquarters had been drifty, musty even. The kind of old, freezing building where no charm can make the ice in the walls truly go away. She could still feel its chills in her bones. She could still perceive it, painted on her eyelids, even when the blue, blue sky attracted her gaze like a jewel. It promised quiet times and long days, and naps, long, long naps while cradled in the smell of clover and honeysuckle, and a part of Gabrielle knew she should crave these things in desperation.

Another part of her, that didn't feel buried all the way in the back of her subconscious, that could have still moved muscled and coaxed limbs into bending, that could have done more than acknowledge logic and that could have made her soul twitch, that part was placidly numb.

As it was, she stood there, trembling in the hot, sunny day, thinking about Mother braiding her hair, and Father gifting earrings for every of her birthdays, about Fleur twirling in her wedding dress, and Hermione sleeping slumped against Draco's shoulder, and though she could tell she was crying, she did nothing to wipe away the tears.

She did nothing to stop. She just stood there, cocooned in spells and emptiness, until her feet itched and her eyes dried and her cheeks became sticky with shed tears, and let the day spoon its spools of thread and waited.

When the sun started to obviously descend, she got up again, threw a glamour over herself and glided toward the town below, intent to at least get her hands on a thrown away newspaper.

The hooves started hearing when she was nearing the first houses and she turned to the right to see the rider adjusting a bowler hat on his head while leisurely pulling the reins. She took in his tan boots and his black coat, with its long sleeves and metal buttons, and remembered one of the many fashion projects she had done for her Muggle Studies class at Beauxbatons, and felt the heaviness of dread pool in the pit of her stomach.

The rider took her in, a petite form with unclear features and a stick held tight in a hand, looking transfixed, and damnable, and pitiable as she stood there in her strange clothes, and nodded with something akin to uncertainty.

"Are you feeling alright, Miss? May I be of any help to you?" he asked, and if his accent was a little too pretentious, and his good looks a little shaking, Gabrielle couldn't say she had really observed.

She stared at his coat some more, at his hat and his boots and his _gloves_ , and swallowed hard. If anything, the 1920's man swallowed back, unsettled.

* * *

 _ **To all of you who commented, you are darlings. True darlings. Have a new chapter.**_


	3. Walk Softly, Stranger

**3.**

"Miss?" he repeated. His voice had grown a bit more commanding, his uncertainty dissolved in smooth skin and absorbed into his bones. "Are you unwell?" Then "Are you lost?"

Gabrielle shook her head, a brusque motion that sent limp strands of hair whipping around in disarray. The man's frown deepened.

"Are you quite certain you don't need any help?"

He dismounted with what her exhausted brain informed it was perfect form and guided the horse towards her. The clippity-clop that ensued stabbed repeatedly between the creases of her brain, little pokes sharp like hummingbirds' beaks.

It propelled her back with the deadly efficiency of an Avada Kedavra to the heart.

 _(Scene: Fleur, eyes empty, body a bag of twisted cartilages and ground osseous matter, staring and staring and staring with a most unnerving indifference reflecting from within._

 _Fact: Gabrielle hated these demented silences more than almost anything._

" _You need to eat," she said like she'd been doing for the best part of an hour to no visible result. Again, Fleur took no notice of the spoonful hovering near her lips and Gabrielle let it fall back in the bowl, making sure it would clink against the already chipped china._

 _No reaction._

 _The chicken soup had long since gone cold, a thin film of grease covering its surface like ice. Some time ago, the bowl itself had started to tremble in her hands._

 _That was not quite right and yet –_

 _She had to believe it was the crockery shaking like the spasmodic heart of a mouse in the cat's dish. If Gabrielle allowed herself to admit weakness even for a moment, she might never rearrange her crumbs in anything resembling functionality._

" _Fleur?" she insisted. "Est-ce que tu vas manger? Pour moi?"_

 _Nothing._

 _It was almost always nothing._

" _Still nothing?" Charlie half leant into the room, face pale, both hands on the doorframe, fingers whitened from the force of the grip. He always came to check on her but he never quite made it all the way inside._

" _Nothing," Gabrielle spat. She was so angry, so useless, she wanted to splash the walls with the disgusting broth just to have the satisfaction of having hurt something. She didn't. "Why is it always nothing?"_

 _Charlie shuffled, evidently more than uncomfortable with the question. "I can't believe she…"_

" _Bill?" Fleur's gaze – when had she even moved? – was glued to him, to his freckles, to his milky skin, to his hair turned orange by the dim light. Only for a moment. Then something less scattered inside her scattered mind whispered_ _ **no, that's not quite right**_ _and she wilted right there like the flower she was named after._

 _Any other Weasley would have come to rest a hand against Gabrielle's shoulder then. Not Charlie. Charlie felt too dead. Charlie felt too guilty._

 _Gabrielle understood. And she didn't, at the same time._

 _Like every time her mind did titter on the edge of something palpable, Fleur started clucking her tongue in a hypnotic, despondent rhythm._

 _Gabrielle hated that even more than the silences.)_

"Stay back!" she snapped. "Don't come… Don't come any closer to me."

He was no threat. Veelas could tell these things and there was no ounce of magic in his blood. Still, she held her wand at the ready, hexes on the tip of her tongue, images continuously battling to play against her retinas. "Stay back," she said again and it might have trembled a bit like a sob.

The stranger seemed torn between bewilderment and exasperation. It was, she observed, a look that did not quite seem to fit on his face.

"I could," he finally said making a retreating motion, "but the next man might not be so impressed by your stick-wielding abilities. And what they offer might not be help, exactly."

"I can take them," she said and she really could but was not surprised when he said "No, sweetheart, you really can't." She did not look – or feel, for that matter – like a war veteran right then. She supposed she looked empty. She _felt_ empty. So when he said "Did you run away? Is that it?", she agreed.

It was convenient enough, for a girl covered in dust and cuts, to have escaped from a turned-on-its-head home, and it was plausible, and she needed help.

"Yes, yes, I did." She thought for a moment. "I'm not going back," she added.

He had, as she'd assumed he would, enough delicacy not to prod.

"No," he said and took a step closer, seemingly pleased when she didn't flinch away yet again. "I suppose you are not. Do you have a name?"

"Gabrielle," she said. At his raised eyebrow, she raised a shoulder in turn. "Just Gabrielle."

The slight amusement fit much better with his eyebrows.

"I'm Tom, Just Gabrielle. And we shall find you a place to stay. At least, for the time being."

* * *

 **I know nobody will probably read this story anymore but hey, here's an update.**


	4. Little Town full of Little People

**4.**

As it turned out, Tom was not what one would call a quiet road companion.

That was not the strange part – men tended to react while in the presence of Veelas and react variedly at that. Some froze. Fewer still panicked. Most got so high on the halo of allure the pheromones painted around her sort that they begun to slough their skin until all that remained out of their facades were cells and words that streamed like blood and foolishness.

She was used to men making fools out of themselves around her. What surprised was that he didn't.

It wasn't even what he said but the way his presence seemed to exude out of his body and unfurl into the open space. He pointed and he waved and he made the occasional comment and all the while the air would contort around and frame him like a halo.

He had presence, her mother would have said.

He had charm, her father would have scoffed.

He didn't talk about himself at all, Gabrielle observed.

Rather, Tom talked about everyone else. He talked about Maud, how she refused to get married and wear matching shoes. From the porch of a little house, Maud waved. Her shoes, low Mary Janes with polished buckles, were one brown and one white. He talked about Deborah, who suffered from partial deafness and the incapability of understanding starch collars had long since gone out of fashion. From the upper window of another house, Deborah nodded and arranged the stiff collar of her dress. He talked about Albert and how he'd broken that leg trying to impress a girl. About how the girl had not been that impressed, overall. From the other side of the road, where he leant heavily on his crutch, Albert's mouth first went slack then curved into something that wanted to be an alluring grin. His effort was severely undermined by the reddish substance spotting the skin around his mouth.

These were real people. These were surreal real people.

It was so far removed from where she had been no more than twenty hours before, it made her wonder if the earth under her feet still spun.

"It's a quaint little place," Gabrielle said.

They made their way up First Street, which looked like it could as well have been named Only Street, and the people pretended not to stare, which was to be expected, and they pretended not to point, which was to be expected, but none of them approached, which, happy happenstance that it was, was a bit unexpected.

It was quaint. And provincial, in a charming sort of way.

"And, as you'll soon see, Great Hangleton is a quaint slightly bigger place," Tom sighed. Creases curled around the edges of his mouth just to intensify a second after. "It's dreadfully boring, I fear."

"I can do with boring," Gabrielle smiled a longing little smile. "I haven't had boring in a long while. It'll seem peaceful."

"It'll seem peaceful at first," he disagreed. "Half an hour. Half a day. Then it'll be what it is and what it has always been. Which is boring."

"Is that why you know everything about everyone?"

It was, she thought after she said it, mortifyingly indelicate. She had known almost everything about almost everyone at the headquarters too. By the end, Gabrielle had known how many times Hermione stirred the two spoonfuls of sugar she put in her coffee and in how many steps Molly Weasley reached the second-floor bathroom in the three times she woke every night. It was different, yes, but not that different. The headquarters – cramped and reeking of stress – had been tedious. The same way being stuck here must be tedious for Tom.

She bit her lip guiltily.

"I'm sorry. That came out all wrong. I…"

For a split second, Tom stared. Then he laughed. He had one of those laughs, full-bellied and rumbling, like a thunder. Around them, people busy pretending not to look became even busier.

He shook his head mirthlessly, looking still highly entertained by her foot-in-mouth moment. "It's fine. I usually like to pretend that knowing all this stuff helps with my book but you're right. It's mostly just boredom."

That surprised her. "You're a writer?" It was not that he didn't look like a writer. It was that he didn't look like anything in particular other than a gentleman.

A grimace blossomed on his face. "Can you be called a writer if you never published?" he asked.

Tom didn't wait for an answer. They had almost reached the end of the street by now and he fluttered a hand towards a white building, tucked away between two smaller ones, looking, like the rest of the village, quite homely, with its maroon shutters and large oak door. A sign swinging gently in the wind next to a similarly swinging oil lamp announced in chipped painting "The Red Rooster's Inn and Pub."

"I think you'll like it here," Tom said.

Gabrielle parted her lips, unsure whether to protest – no money – or to agree – he didn't look like he expected her to pay. Then the door swung open and a man, looking brutish and unclean, stormed past them in a furry. Another stranger followed and he was all sharp cheekbones and stormy eyes. Those same eyes stopped on Tom for a minute and his mouth curled, half distaste and half guilt.

His voice carried them both on a sigh when he spoke. "You."

* * *

 _ **You people are the nicest readers and I thank you so much for your nice comments. For Cat Beats, who asked about Grindelwald, I only see him with Albus, sorry. But I have a story with him in the works, so keep an eye out for that if seeing Albus Dumbledore in love at 18 doesn't freak you out. Also, next chapter or the one after, you people are in for a bit of a surprise.**_

 _ ***look at me updating twice in less than a week. I almost seem productive***_


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